Standards are necessary both for integration and for interoperability. However, any actual implementation of a standard requires some form of tailoring. Therefore, in developing practical and effective interoperability solutions, an industry relies on integration profiles which are business processes describing selected real-world use-cases. One important industry initiative, Integrating Healthcare Enterprise (IHE), has taken this profiling approach to achieve interoperability in the eHealth domain.
IHE is a not-for-profit initiative founded by the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) and the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) and is supported by a wide range of healthcare professional societies world-wide. Through the IHE Profiles, the interactions between the IT systems in healthcare are described and the details of interfaces are fixed based on the standards. The approach taken in developing the integration profiles is first to define the basic transactions describing the interactions between the IT systems and then to define the workflows describing the real-life business processes by using these transactions together with the standard interfaces. Since IHE Profiles describe the specific use cases, there is a need to combine more than one IHE Profile to achieve the required functionality in realizing a real-world scenario. For example, one profile, called an IHE Cross-Enterprise Document Sharing (IHE-XDS) Profile, specifies how patient clinical data can be shared among different healthcare enterprises and allows Electronic Healthcare Records (EHRs) to be shared through a common ebXML Registry/Repository architecture. Another profile, called a Patient Identifier Cross-referencing Integration (IHE-PIX) Profile, specifies how patient identifiers used in different healthcare institutes should be mapped to each other and supports the cross-referencing of patient identifiers from multiple patient identifier domains.